Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Tick Follows Tock Follows Tick Follows Tock: Late Stage Rushdie

The Eleventh Hour by Salman Rushdie

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  Salman Rushdie has always played with time, but as his own clock starts to wind down it sees him more reflective than before. There are 5 stories in all, 3 novellas, and 2 short stories and 2 of these have already appeared in print in the New Yorker. Most of these stories were written after Rushdie’s very intimate brush with death in 2022 and the emotional weight of this event and his life can be felt through them all. It feels like his most […]

Languages of Truth

Languages of Truth by Salman Rushdie

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This is the newest collection of Salman Rushdie essays, and like the previous two cover a little more than 15 years or so. The consistency of all three is his wit and intellect, but especially his promotion of social causes, especially regarding race and representation. If you’ve read any Salman Rushdie novels, you might recognize or agree that they often involve elaborate story-telling, often silly dives into the minutiae of life, and lofty language, peppered with erudition and intelligence. He’s one of those writers for […]

Imaginary Homelands – Salman Rushdie (1991)

IMaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie

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Of the handful of nonfiction works I’ve read by Rushdie, this one feels like the most important and essential one. There’s some significant strengths in this one, so very necessary commentary, and nuanced understandings that either exist less in his later writing, or possibly exist less in his later thinking. If we’re thinking less of Rushdie as a public individual with a variety of views and a changing orientation toward the world and more of a writer who is presenting his views on these particular […]

Tossing in a bunch at once.

The Ice Shirt by William Vollmann

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

The Rip Off by Jim Thompson

On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Why are We in Vietnam? by Norman Mailer

A Winter Haunting by Dan Simmons

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The Ice Shirt – 3/5 Stars I might be Viking-ed out. Between this novel, playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla (which is a ton of game), and rewatching the Marvel movies (and with Loki starting up right now) this book was poorly chosen for me to read right now. But it’s a book I’ve been planning to read for 20 years and have failed to a few times, so maybe this is just my reaction to the book. The book is a kind of mixed media novel […]

The Jaguar Smile – Salman Rushdie (1987)

The Jaguar Smile by Salman Rushdie

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In the introduction of this small book of political commentary, journalism, live-history Rushdie, ten years on admits to getting caught up a little in the glitz and glamor of the event. I’ve felt the same when I look into revolutionary movements in countries I don’t understand, where my understanding of it must convert more to almost caricature and flattness, or if I am lucky typology, in the absence of knowledge and understanding. And Rushdie admits for falling a little for the romanticism here. It’s not […]

In the remote border town of Q., which when seen from the air resembles nothing so much as an ill-proportioned dumb-bell, there once lived three lovely, and loving, sisters.

Shame by Salman Rushdie

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This is Salman Rushdie’s third novel (after Grimus and Midnight’s Children) and this novel takes place in a city called Q in a country that seems an awful lot like Pakistan (and is definitely Pakistan) but which we’re repeatedly told is not Pakistan. The affectation in making these claims is to pose some distance both politically and historically, but also in the storytelling. Because this novel is not historical fiction, and in fact is a confabulation of events and people (however much they seem like real people […]



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